BeeBiome:Omic approaches for understanding bee-microbe relationships

Bees have evolved durable relationships with a diverse set of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa. These microbial communities comprise beneficial and detrimental symbionts and their composition is likely a key determinant for the health status of the host. Furthermore, based on existing data, social bee species seem to harbor more consistent and specific communities than non-social ones, indicating that bees could represent suitable models to study the evolution of host-microbe interactions given different degrees of host sociality.
High-throughput sequencing technologies allow us to acquire vast amounts of sequencing data (metagenomics) from the microbial communities of different bee populations, synthesize the results and obtain comprehensive patterns of microbe-host webs. To make this possible, metagenomic sequence data produced by different laboratories need to be consistently analyzed and archived allowing integration and subsequent exploitation by scientists from different research areas, such as bee pathology, microbial ecology, and evolution.
The aim of the proposed meeting will be to gather an interdisciplinary group of scientists working on different aspects of bee science, including microbiologists, epidemiologists, evolutionists and computer scientists. This group will (i) define the most burning questions regarding bee microbiome interactions and the effect of the environment on its composition, (ii) identify an appropriate strategy to address these questions, including the design of tools such as a dedicated database, (iii) discuss future collaborative efforts to fund the proposed research.